Vanilla
Vanilla is the world’s most popular flavouring, and after saffron, the second most expensive spice. The plant Vanilla planifolia is a member of the orchid family and is native to the Central America region.
It is a climbing vine with yellowish, green or white flowers, and the fruits are seed pods typically 15–20cm long. These pods are the much sought-after spice – the curing process that is required to develop the characteristic flavour (by increasing the vanillin concentration) is extremely laborious and takes months, which is a major reason for the high product price. In addition to the curing, the pollination itself is a difficult business. Two other species have less fragrant pods – V. pompona and V. tahitensis – but they are commercially far less significant. The taste of vanilla is often described as sweet, rich and creamy, with a fragrant aroma. Flavour profiles differ between individual species, varieties and geographic sources.The earliest vanilla users appear to have been the Totonac and Aztec people of Mexico. The Aztecs had developed an early taste for vanilla before their conquest by the Spanish. Hernan Cortes defeated the Aztecs in 1521, and their king Moctezuma was captured and subsequently killed. Bernal Diaz, one of Cortes’ trusted lieutenants, described a feast before Moctezuma’s seizure in which a great dinner was followed according to the local custom ‘by the frothing jugs of cacao liquor; certainly 2,000 of them’.22 Chocolate was used as a cold drink by the Aztecs and often flavoured with vanilla, chili and flowers of Cymbopetalum penduliflorum, as well as other ingredients.23
After the Spanish exposure to vanilla, it quickly became popular – first in Spain, and then throughout Europe. Hugh Morgan was Elizabeth I’s apothecary who reportedly introduced vanilla to the queen as a ‘sweetmeat’.
The seventeenth-century physician Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma provided a recipe for chocolate – cacao mixed with chili, aniseed, Cymbopetalum, hoja santa, vanilla, cinnamon, nuts, sugar and achiote for colour – as a spicy and sweet medicinal beverage.24Vanilla’s popularity extended to the romantic: the eighteenth-century German physician Bezaar Zimmerman claimed it to be a highly efficient aphrodisiac and claimed that it had helped 342 impotent men become ‘astonishing lovers’.25
Vanilla was introduced to other suitable tropical environments – Reunion (an island in the Indian Ocean, formerly Île de Bourbon) in 1793, which would overtake Mexico in production by the end of the nineteenth century; Java in 1819; India in 1835; Tahiti in 1848; the Seychelles in 1866; and Madagascar, which is now the world’s largest producer.
Early attempts to cultivate vanilla outside of Mexico were unsuccessful, as flowers couldn’t be pollinated and therefore the pods wouldn’t grow. It was only in the 1830s that it was realised that vanilla flowers were pollinated by local orchid bees and hummingbirds. The solution to this problem came in 1841 when a slave in Reunion, Edmond (12 years old at the time, later ‘rewarded’ with freedom and the surname Albius), devised a simple but effective technique to hand-pollinate the flowers. He used the sharp tip of a bamboo sliver to place pollen on to the concealed stigma of the flowers; a similar technique is still used today. To complicate matters further, the flowers only last for a day and it takes six to nine months for the fruits to mature. Key vanilla products are pods, powder, vanilla extract (the major commercial product), oleoresin, vanilla sugar and vanilla absolute (used in perfumery products).26
Vanilla didn’t appear in cookery books until the early nineteenth century, but from that point it became commonplace. The Virginia Housewife was the first in the US to provide a recipe for ‘Vanilla Cream’ (i.e.
ice cream):Boil a Vanilla bean in a quart of rich milk, until it has imparted the flavour sufficiently then take it out, and mix with the milk, eight eggs, yelks and whites beaten well; let it boil a little longer; make it very sweet, for much of the sugar is lost in the operation of freezing.27
The main flavour-producing compound in vanilla is vanillin, a phenolic aldehyde, though many other volatile compounds have been identified. Synthetic vanillin was first created in 1874 by two German scientists – this was an important development given the expense of natural vanilla, but also a serious commercial threat to the newly successful vanilla growers. Synthetic vanillin supply far exceeds that of natural vanillin due to the high global demand which couldn’t otherwise be met by natural production. And yet … synthetic vanillin is pure vanillin – it lacks the other complex compounds found for example in natural vanilla extract. True vanilla aficionados demand the natural product and are prepared to pay the price.
Some recent archaeological work has rather turned things upside down regarding the first usage of vanilla. Four Bronze Age ceramic jugs from a site in Canaan, Israel, were tested using organic residue analysis and significant content of vanillin, and two other components characteristic of vanilla, were found in three of them.28 These jobs are from around 1650–1550 BCE – how could vanilla have been used here at that time? The source was probably from lesser-known species of vanilla orchids native to East Africa or Asia, that then somehow reached the Levant – it remains an intriguing question.